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Monday, 7 July 2008

Interview with Joe Jackson, author of the thief at...

1. When and why did HW come to Santarem? Did he intend to take the seeds from the very beginning?Wickham came to Santarem from London in 1871. He had actually stopped briefly in 1870, when returning home aboard a riverboat after a disastrous trip on the Orinoco. Although he was interested in rubber when he came back, I don't think he had any idea that he was going to send seeds back to Kew. Instead, he wanted to come to the Amazon and become a planter, and rubber was one of the things he planned to grow. Sugar cane was the other. He'd tried to tap rubber on the Orinoco, and had been persuaded by the British consul in Belim that a hardworking young man could make it rich as a rubber planter on the Amazon. Young men spread out to the edges of the influence of the British Empire in those days and tried to become successful planters – it was one of the dreams of empire, along with military glory.

2 & 3. Was he alone? How long did he stay? ELE VEIO SÓ?? QUANTO TEMPO ELE FICOU???Wickham came with his mother, his wife Violet, his sister and her husband, his brother and his wife, an undetermined number of English workmen, and his sister-in-law's mother. All were going to start the plantation described in #1. He stayed until 1876, the year he smuggled the seeds. By then, all of the workmen had either died or deserted Wickham; his mother had died, as well as his sister and his sister-in-law's mother, supposedly from either yellow fever or malaria. He saw the seeds as his way out of the Amazon – he'd nearly died twice himself, watched those he loved die around him in pursuit of his dreams, and was nearly penniless by 1876.ELE VEIO COM SUA MÃE, SUA ESPOSA VIOLET, SUA IRMÃ E O MARIDO DELA, SEU IRMÃO E A ESPOSA E UM CERTO NUMERO DE TRABALHADORES INGLESES. TODOS COM O INTUITO DE COMEÇAR AS PLANTAÇÕES MENCIONADAS. ELE PERMANECEU ATÉ 1876, O ANO QUE ELE TRAFICOU AS SEMENTES DE SERINGUEIRA. SUA MÃE E IRMÃ JA TINHA MORRIDO MUITO PROVAVELMENTE DE FEBRE AMARELA OU MALARIA. ELE PERCEBEU AS SEMENTES COMO UMA MANEIRA DE SAIR DE SANTAREM - POR DUAS VEZES ELE QUASE MORREU, VIU AS PESSOAS QUE ELE AMAVA MORRENDO NA BUSCA DO SEU SONHO, ELE TAVA COM POUCO DINHEIRO EM 1876.

I was fascinated by the fact that he was haunted by ambition and the dream of success as defined by the British Empire, and he spent his entire life chasing that vision in one shape or another. His father was an attorney, or "solicitor," and so he was born into a comfortable middle-class existence, but his father died of cholera when he was 4 years old. He spent his life trying to regain that lost social caste, and in so doing, he dragged others with him into ruin – his wife, his mother, the Amazon Basin when the seeds he smuggled started to produce cheap rubber in Great Britain's Far Eastern colonies. It was unbelievable how one man could change the fate of nations, yet he did so in the grip of a delusion.

5. Did he become rich by smuggling the seeds? ELE TORNOU-SE RICO LEVANDO AS SEMENTES?

Not at all. He was paid somewhere between 700-740 pounds sterling, a healthy price but no fortune. He hoped to be sent to India with the rubber seeds, but upper-class British society found him too low-class and coarse and basically washed its hands of him. In later years, he personally asked Queen Victoria to help him in a legal case against mahogany cutters in British Honduras, and she snubbed him. He became known because of the theft, but not rich. He spent the money for the seeds on land in Queensland, Australia, but he was never a very good farmer and within 10 years he was broke again.